French Suspect Top Libyans In Pan Am Blast, Report Says

By MICHAEL WINES,

Published: June 27, 1991

WASHINGTON, June 26—
Some French investigators are now convinced that senior Libyan officials, including the brother-in-law of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, planned the 1988 bombing of a Pan American World Airways jet that left 270 people dead, a French magazine reported today.

Both men have been implicated by witnesses in the bombing of a passenger jet of the French airline U.T.A. in September 1989. That plane crashed in the Tenere desert in Niger after a plastic device exploded, killing all 171 people aboard. Iran Has Been a Suspect

Libya has previously been linked to the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. But most investigators have said that the bombing probably was sponsored by Iran in revenge for the downing of an Iranian jetliner by a United States warship in the Persian Gulf in July 1988. The American ship's crew shot down the Iranian plane in the mistaken belief that the aircraft was a military fighter.

Citing information from unidentified French sources, L'Express said that Mr. Senoussi and Mr. Khoussa took part in a meeting in Libya in September 1988 in which Libyan officials discussed blowing up French and American jetliners.

The evidence against Mr. Khoussa and Mr. Senoussi was provided by two Libyans now being held by Congolese officials in connection with the U.T.A. bombing, the magazine reported.

Mohammed Naydi, a Libyan intelligence agent suspected by American officials of involvement in the Pan Am bombing, also attended the session, officials have said. American investigators have long suspected that an agent of Mr. Naydi played a role in the Pan Am blast, travelling to Malta to buy clothes to fill the suitcase that also contained the deadly bomb.

A former Central Intelligence Agency official specializing in terorism said tonight that the notion that Libya, not Iran, sponsored the Pan Am bombing appeared credible. But he said that evidence supporting that theory appeared so far to be circumstantial.

Until recently, most investigators had concluded that Iran first contracted with a Syrian terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, to carry out the revenge bombing of the Pan Am jetliner.

The Syrian group's plans were disrupted two months before the bombing when the German police raided an apartment where terrorists were preparing explosives. Investigators have assumed that the operation was then handed off to Libyan experts.

But the French magazine reported that some officials now believe that the Libyan Government independently initiated a plot to blow up an American jetliner in retaliation for an April 1986 raid by American warplanes on Tripoli. Colonel Qaddafi's adopted child was reported to have died in the raid.